Ranked first in the British Film Institute’s wide-reaching, end-of-century survey of British cinema, The Third Man is film noir with rare pedigree: director Carol Reed and actor Orson Welles bring sinister flamboyance to novelist Graham Greene’s literate, perfectly structured thriller script. The setting is devastated post-war Vienna, where American pulp writer Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) has been summoned by his old school friend Harry Lime (Welles). But Harry, it seems, is no longer alive. With a sceptical British Army major (Trevor Howard) and a mysterious actress suggesting possible lines of enquiry, Martins is lured into a criminal underworld of macabre decadence.